I picked up this book because I'm an atheist and I wanted to read something by one of the New Atheists, because the notion that anyone would want to cI picked up this book because I'm an atheist and I wanted to read something by one of the New Atheists, because the notion that anyone would want to capitalize "atheist" seemed somewhat anti-atheistic to me (aatheistic?), and Dennett appeared to be the least pig-headed. Somewhat unfortunately for my project, this book has nothing to do with atheism, but fortunately for me in general, it has everything to do with evolution by natural selection and its implications beyond biology, which is a pretty cool consolation prize.

Unfortunately, being a non-philosopher of middling mental capacities, I did not understand, well, a lot of the interesting parts of this book, possibly because I'm not up to the mental task, possibly because the author is unnecessarily prolix (I can't tell; attempts to make arguments without evidence may require prolixity), possibly because the subjects at hand are intrinsically complicated for everyone. For me, the uninteresting parts were the re-explanation of natural selection and its implications in biology, which Dennett does a good job describing and will probably be pretty good for people with little to no grounding in the area. I also found a lot of the philosophical fisticuffs with individual thinkers (Gould, Chomsky, etc.) to be excessively detailed for a lay reader. Isn't that what journals are for?

Anyway, the rest was really cool, even if I didn't grasp it all. Here are some of my take-homes

Evolution implies incremental states for all biological adaptations, including ideas like meaning, self-awareness, the mind, etc.

If you don't believe in the supernatural and you don't believe anything has simply entered the Universe ex nihilo since the Big Bang, there is no better explanation for the existence of life than evolution by natural selection, and since we have no evidence that ideas exist outside of organisms or their creations, we must assume these ideas also evolved from earlier, simpler forms. I'm frankly an unconscious subscriber to Snow's Two Cultures, and this stuff is definitely on the other side of the fence for me, but that stance is largely due to laziness, or perhaps even a subconscious discomfort with the implications: it's hard to see "determination" in the behavior of a bacterium, say, or to think that there's anything like my sense of purpose in the mechanistic actions of an enzyme. As a scientist, or at least a scientifically disposed person, I generally view these concepts as intractable, or entirely relativistic (kind of the same thing in my mind), but Dennett argues that we need to stop thinking about them in essentialist terms (e.g. meaning is meaning: pseudo-meaning is meaningless), because the alternatives all require supernatural explanations that are themselves unsatisfactory (if God gave us free will, where did she get it from?).

To quote,

Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to "do things." This is not a florid agency—echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellant about the quasi-agency we discover at this level—all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there's nobody home. The molecular machines perform their amazing stunts, obviously exquisitely designed, and just as obviously none the wiser about what they re doing. [...] Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. (pp. 202-203)

Biology is not like engineering, it is engineering

Dennett argues that engineering, unlike other methods of effecting change, generally involves some information gathering, making something imperfect, assessing that something, and then trying again with a better design. He views evolution, and hence all consequent biological adaptations, as being not just analogous, but exactly the same process, with different degrees of the kind of intentionality we usually ascribe to engineering. An eyeball is not miraculous: it's just version 2.0 billion.

Gould & Lewontin did not disprove adaptation by natural selection

The revelation for me is that anyone even thought they did, or that anyone interpreted their famous 1979 paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," as an attempt to replace adaption. I read the paper in college and my hazy recollection was that it was more of an introduction to some legitimate alternatives to adaptation as an explanation for biological phenomena that could apply in a small minority of cases, and that evolutionary biologists shouldn't assume that adaptation is always the reason, even if it usually is. That's basically where Dennett ends up in his assessment, but he goes to what seem like extraordinary lengths in doing so, to the point of dismantling G & L's central metaphor (spandrels, apparently, are not necessary if you want to hold up a vaulted ceiling). Just b/c the metaphor was poorly-chosen doesn't invalidate the idea of non-adaptive features forming the substrate for future adaption ("exaptation"). The rest of his Gould-bashing might be legit, but I think this paper got unfairly lambasted. I guess if the way Dennett depicts its legacy in the humanities is accurate, maybe it was necessary.

The interesting stuff I didn't understand concerned what these kinds of intermediary forms of ideas actually looked like, and how memes can have philosophical relevance without any scientific reality, which was sort of the entire last third of the book, I'm afraid.

Kind of nasty stuff, though having just read the book, I feel like Gould misread Dennett, and while Dennett gets overly personal in some of his criticism of Gould (for my tastes, at least), he is not an Darwinian fundamentalist. I never got the sense he was trying to promote adaptation as the complete explanation for all phenomena in nature, just the bits with design.

Addendum 2

Have to admit I only knew CP Snow's Two Cultures by reputation, but my sister (denizen of the other culture that she is) pointed out that it's kind of awful, and she's right, pretty classic 50s scientific hubris (not to mention classic homophobia and misogyny). I still think people from the sciences and the humanities have trouble talking to each other. Despite the fact that my sister and I just did. And despite this article on Nabokov's butterfly research: http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/speak-b......more

Walking around with this book made me feel like yet another Berkleyan post-hippy fuming over my unresolved anger and guilt over yet another heinous crWalking around with this book made me feel like yet another Berkleyan post-hippy fuming over my unresolved anger and guilt over yet another heinous crime perpetrated by my European cultural forebears: they didn't just enslave Africans, they didn't just exterminate all the Amerindians, but by Gaia, their very ecosystem took over the world! WTF, Columbus?! Where did it end?

To clarify, I am not that guy (well, mostly), and this is not that book (ditto), despite the title. This book is another exploration of the foundations of European success in the rest of the world, particularly in areas where European descendants (genetic and cultural) now dominate (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Argentina). I believe what made Crosby's work novel in the 1980s was that he didn't confine his analysis to European humans, but also pointed out that European plants, animals, and disease organisms were equally successful in colonizing the temperate world.

Aside from my usual qualms with history (not empirical, often based on scanty evidence, prone to digression, etc) I thought this was pretty good, but being somewhat familiar with some of those who followed in Crosby's footsteps (Diamond, Cronon, Mann), there wasn't too much novelty, and I thought his failure to address the importance of American food crops (maize, potatoes, chilies, tomatoes) to non-American culture and sustenance did some damage to his argument. Frankly the more I read these kinds of books the more I respect the wide scope of Charles Mann's work, despite its failings. I did enjoy Crosby's approach of analyzing failed European colonizations (Norse in North American, the Crusades, British Raj) and of their earliest successful efforts on Atlantic islands like Madeira and the Azores (where they also encountered Neolithic peoples that they had trouble subduing before their diseases took hold). If you believe historians like Crosby, it's remarkable how many large patterns in human migration seem to be predicated on disease.

Some Notes

The ancient Sumerians worshipped a god (or goddess) of pests named Ninkilim (p. 29). I want to believe Wikipedia's description of her/him as the "lord of teeming creatures" is accurate because it is beautiful and gross and reminds of Annie Dillard's chapter on fecundity in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Hafvilla is an Old Norse word meaning a complete loss of direction at sea (p. 55). Aside from being ripe with metaphoric potential, I find the idea of total geographic disorientation compelling, maybe because it reminds me of Hicksville. Also, new name for my future band and/or pub: Hafvillaphilia.

Like a creeping thing,The land is moving;When gone, where shall manFind a dwelling?p. 262, apparently a Maori song, also reminiscent of Hicksville

I wish the "Explanations" chapter had been longer. Why are Eurasian weeds so much more successful than American ones? I don't buy the whole adaptation to disturbance theory. American humans were disturbing things plenty before European plants arrived, so some American plants should (and are) adapted to disturbance just fine....more

Culture plays a significant role in the success or failure of civilizations. Interesting thesis, right? One that might not seem so objectionable untilCulture plays a significant role in the success or failure of civilizations. Interesting thesis, right? One that might not seem so objectionable until you state it in concrete historical terms: Western civilizations have dominated the world for the last 200 years largely because of their culture. Culture is personal, so people take things like this personally: you're saying Europeans are intrinsically superior to other people? Eurocentrist! Bigot! Racist!

David Landes has been called a Eurocentrist, and probably meaner things too, but the author present in this book is clearly not prejudiced. He's distinctly postjudiced. He probably knows more about non-European cultures than you do, and extolls many of their virtues, but after thinking about a huge range of history, he finds themes in Western culture that he believes were critical to its success. I think that's a totally legitimate opinion, and I admire Landes for exploring a touchy subject in a world of haters.

However, as legitimate as it may be, it's still an opinion, which brings us to this book's first failing: arrogance. The very title is absurdly presumptuous in its scope, as if a satisfying explanation existed for the inequality of nations, but titles are meant to be provocative. What bugged me was the fact that the importance of culture in the behavior of groups is exquisitely difficult to prove in the present, under semi-controlled conditions, with relatively small numbers of people. Does Google outperform Yahoo because they have a superior culture? Or because they have better tech, better recruiters, better spies, better something else? That's very tough thing to prove, and if you wanted to try you would have to perform extensive surveying, interviews, and qualitative observation to convince any self-respecting sociologist. Scale that up to civilizations and restrain yourself to the scant anecdotal evidence history provides us and you really have to start injecting some first person quid pro quos, e.g. a lot of "I think"s and "In my opinion"s, something Landes rarely does. I guess this is a critique of history as a discipline more than of this book in particular, but the scale of the claims being made here, and the fact that there are specific interpretations being presented, just irritated the scientist in me. I suppose history, like so many branches of inquiry in which deduction is a practical impossibility, has a tendency to overstate its explanatory power.

The anal informaticist in me was also repeatedly incensed by some seriously un-cited passages, like one in which he explains that printing never caught on in China because ideographs are intrinsically hard to set in type, and that ideographs dissuade literacy: "one may learn the characters as a child, but if one does not keep using them, one forgets how to read" (p. 51). Perhaps he thought the challenges ideographs presented to printing are common knowledge or obvious, but I disagree. You have to cite facts! Granted I am a citation Nazi, but come on, he's a historian!

Speaking of historians, are there any histories that don't include numerous pointless tangents in which the historian lays out the factual history of pet interest X, regardless of whether X has any relevance to the overall thesis? Frankly I enjoyed most of the tangents in this book, but they really just muddy the waters. State hypothesis, present evidence, recapitulate hypothesis, analyze, repeat. Stay on target.

In the end, I enjoyed reading this, but I would only recommend it as a source for further reading material. I didn't find the largely secondary, anecdotal, and correlational evidence he presented convincing. I would very much mistrust any work that cites this book as a source of anything other than opinion. I am, however, interested in reading some of Landes's work on the historical importance of timekeeping.

gravamen (n): part of an argument that carries the most weight, or any accusation. Perhaps also the name of my future metal band. Currently vying with "One Great Black Woolfe of a More Than Ordinarie Bigness, Which Is Like to Be More Feirce and Bould Than the Rest, and So Occasions the More Hurt." Definitely wins for brevity.

contumacy (n): stubbornness (p. 181)

cui bono (L): for whose benefit? (p. 225)

suzerainty (n): basically lordship. A suzerain was a French feudal lord. (p. 430)

irredentism (n): belief in annexing some other place to your own holdings b/c the people there share something in common with you. Pretty arcane. (p. 435)

FUTURE

The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia - cited a lot in the first chapter, a Eurocentric antecedent to Landes

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12... - published after Landes, but on the same theme, and solidly in the culture camp - Acemoglu wrote that interesting paper on disease and resulting societal structures

Here we go, first time reviewing a book written by someone I know. Feeling the pressure a) not to be mean, but b) not to pull any punches. Onward.

ThisHere we go, first time reviewing a book written by someone I know. Feeling the pressure a) not to be mean, but b) not to pull any punches. Onward.

This book describe a current effort to link open space for the entire stretch of the Rocky Mountains, from the Yukon to the Yucatan. From beaver to bear to pronghorn to jaguar, wildlife of all stripes have historically used this enormous corridor as their home and their highway, some of them migrating thousands of miles to breed or simply find new territory. But the encroachment of human settlement has cut this area to pieces, stranding wildlife in virtual islands of open space surrounded by impassable cities, suburbs, and interstates. The effects of such isolation on wildlife range from genetic stagnation to an inability to find more appropriate homes as humanity changes the climate, but generally spell doom for many of our continent's most awe-inspiring and ecologically important creatures.

Enter the Spine of the Continent, a massive collaboration between scientists, government agencies, NGOs, and private land-owners to reconnect the continent's severed vertebrae and ensure our land's spectacular ecological legacy. Hannibal's mission is to persuade you of this project's importance, introduce its charismatic cast of key players, and describe the many ecological processes humanity has diminished and that this project seeks to restore.

On the whole I think she succeeds. A great deal of this book concerns laying some biological groundwork: if you don't know what biogeography, island biogeography, and wildlife corridors are or don't really know why they're important, this is enormously valuable and Hannibal is a great guide, writing highly approachable prose and ensuring all lessons include a healthy dose of personality, whether the scientists' or her own. If you already know this stuff, these sections are kind of a drag, and maybe it's the stuck-up East Coast snoot in me, but words like "bass-ackward" and "ginormous" don't have a place in non-fiction outside of quotation marks. I can't even imagine Edward Abbey using "ginormous," though bass-ackwards would have suited him. End tangent.

I found the portrait of Michael Soulé to be very interesting, and I was frankly glad that long portions of the book's first third are straight biography of this fascinating man: an academic who left academia, a Buddhist who hunts, a conservationist hero who invented conservation biology and yet still summons tears when making his plea for nature. I knew embarrassingly little about him aside from his famous paper on mesopredator release (remove coyotes form suburban SoCal and birds decline, b/c the cats the coyotes terrorized eat all the birds). Now my embarrassment is lessened.

The biological portraits constituting the latter two thirds are fun and interesting, but somewhat tangential. Few of them include the critical refrain of "and here's why this animal depends on the connectivity the Spine will provide." If this book is a rhetorical device to communicate the vital importance of this project, each creature feature needs to be included in the argument. It's often implied, but I think it needs to be stated outright.

Regardless of my qualms, though, I was convinced that the project is important, and this books makes for a compelling introduction. Trying to find information about it online convinced me all the more, because http://wildlandsnetwork.org doesn't even begin to communicate the sweep and complexity of this vision (as of October 2012), and some simple searches don't lead to much. Clearly it needs more articulate, impassioned advocates like Mary Ellen Hannibal.

Addendum

If anyone from the Spine is reading this, here's what a want: a simple page that shows up as the top hit when I search for "Spine of the Continent" that shows a map of the project highlighting where the current gaps in connectivity are and what you're doing to close them. The current map looks like you've already succeeded! Show maps from past years so we can see progress as gaps are closed. Include the identities of the many partners to show us how epic this collaboration really is, but have your own logo, your own name, your own branding to convince us that it's a unified effort (I mean Spine branding, not Wildlands Network branding)....more

"Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of exactitude," De Waal writes at the beginning. "And this n"Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of exactitude," De Waal writes at the beginning. "And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return." This is a promising way to open a family history alarmingly described as "extraordinarily moving" on the back cover blurb, a blurb that also mentions Nazis. Maybe this won't be another history to further blunt the worn edges of my horror and outrage. Maybe it will be something else. Why does this British man have a tiny Japanese sculpture in his pocket?

So I began intrigued, by De Waal and Iggy and Jiro and these weird little sculptures called "netsuke." Charles and the Parisian Ephrussis were interesting, though for much of this portion I just felt bad about not having read Proust, and while the netsuke make their entrance, they are not handled. They are not exact in the sense De Waal clearly appreciates, probably because this section seems the most constructed from research and public documents than the more personal sources he used from his own family. Nevertheless, an interesting portrait of Jews in 19th century Paris. Who knew they were such expert swordsmen?

In Vienna the netsuke encounter De Waal's direct ancestors, including his mother Elisabeth and his uncle Iggy. The family has more personality and the netsuke have a more definite position in De Waal's grandmother's dressing room, where her children would attend her as she prepared for an evening. They would take out the netsuke and she would tell them stories. The brindled wolf in the author's pocket acquires layers of memory with each glancing touch through the years, and De Waal conveys it, with poise and discretion. Elisabeth's return to Nazi-occupied Vienna and impersonation of a gestapo officer tantalizes with drama, real drama, but De Waal grants it only a paragraph, perhaps out of respect for his mother's carefully dispensed recollections, perhaps because appreciating that derring-do is another form of melancholy for things lost to time.

Some of this discretion, these omissions, make the book more interesting. Elisabeth burned many of her correspondences, and De Waal wonders why, but will never know. Iggy is gay but his gayness is never addressed directly. His partner is simply De Waal's Japanese uncle. Doesn't being gay on top of being Austrian, Jewish, and American living in Tokyo or fighting with the Americans in WWII form an essential part of Iggy's experience? Netsuke were originally practical objects that kept a corded pouch from slipping through a kimono sash, and yet they lost their utilitarian value entirely when they traveled to Europe and become purely aesthetic objects. Surely this transition concerns a ceramicist like De Waal, a man so concerned with tangibility?

In some ways I also wanted more about expatriates and assimilation. My parents are expatriates that have never chosen to naturalize despite living in the US for almost 30 years and raising 3 American children, and while I did naturalize and feel American, I still don't have roots in the land stretching back generations. De Waal describes the Jews of Europe and the Ephrussis in particular as perpetual expats, forever suspected by their gentile neighbors despite all efforts to assimilate, but I was more interested in Iggy in LA, Elisabeth in England, Gisela in Mexico, expats who not only left their homes but did so as individuals, creating homes and families of their on in alien places. What drove them? What kept them?

The book is a personal and personalized history that spans numerous cultures and places in ways I was not expecting (there's even a Middlemarch reference in there, Ak). Definitely recommended.

Addendum

My brother got me these amazingly detailed netsuke-like magnets and cell phone charms when he was in Japan last spring:

Some required retroactive expectation management: Marc Reisner was a journalist, writing for a general audience. Much like Charles Mann and Pollan andSome required retroactive expectation management: Marc Reisner was a journalist, writing for a general audience. Much like Charles Mann and Pollan and other pop-non-fiction writers from the journalistic world, he was less concerned with thorough documentation than he was with persuasion and exposition (even though few things are more persuasive than accurate documentation and logical analysis). With that in mind, I should not have been so utterly enraged by the nearly complete absence of direct citations in this book, despite numerous facts, figures, and yea, quoted dialogue included. Reisner was writing without the benefit of Endnote, after all, and he was a well-respected, tweedy-looking academic, so I should just trust him, right?

Some intriguing propositions:

Teddy Roosevelt personally colluded with the city of Los Angles, the Reclamation Service, and the Forest Service to destroy the irrigated communities in Owens Valley for the sake of LA.

I guess the fact that TR's brand of environmentalism was way more utilitarian than most people think isn't exactly news, but the fact that his utilitarianism extended to provisioning a metropolis like LA was a bit surprising.

Irrigated agriculture in the American West was (is?) supported by a welfare state.

Apparently it's ok for the state to pay farmers in Ohio not to farm while practically giving away subsidized water to giant agribusiness conglomerates owned by oil companies in California, but universal healthcare is a waste of money and would never work. At least I know I'm free! Just not free to eat wild salmon.

Damming and hydropower in the Pacific NW was instrumental in WWII b/c electricity (and lots of it) are required to produce aluminum for planes and plutonium for A-bombs.

Reisner basically asserts that the US might not have defeated the Axis if it weren't for northwestern hydropower, which is a pretty amazing idea that would have been even more amazing with some supporting evidence showing increasing electricity generation and aluminum production in the US, Germany, and Japan during the war years. Should I read Richard Rhodes?

In addition to the citation thing, there were also these surreal moments of anti-Irish racism, like this description of William Mullholand: "[His] face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm" (p. 58). Seriously, find a Japanese farmer who's "cunning and inscrutable" and you'll just about have me pegged, Marc! I might have to slam some Jameson and karate chop you to death! Maybe it's petty of me to go all ad hominem on a dead environmentalist who clearly, despite lack of citation, knew more about the history of water in the West than I ever will, and yes, the stereotypical Irish American is himself racist and perhaps anti-Irish bigotry is so outdated and comical that the Simpsons were able to repeatedly employ it to great comedic effect over a decade ago, *breathes* but c'mon, this kind of crap isn't appropriate in a respected work of non-fiction. Even from the 80s.

Overall, if I swallowed my aforementioned misgivings, this was a fascinating and engaging history of water in the West. I was both intrigued and impressed by Reisner's unwillingness to impose some kind of grand theory on it all. The events he depicts seem mostly driven by greed, incompetence, petty competition, and simple climactic contingency. I never got the sense that he was driving toward some absurdly reductive single flaw in our culture. Water use in the West is messed up, and this book is mostly about how it got that way, not why. For all its reputation as an environmentalist fire-starter (to mix metaphors quite horrifically), though, I was surprised at how little doomsaying Reisner indulged in. Not until the very end does he start talking about silting reservoirs and salting the earth. I should also say that despite the lack of citation, the bibliography looks great! I wonder if the interviews he conducted have been archived anywhere.

"A strange and traumatic experience," David Foster Wallace wrote in an essay on attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards, "which one of yr. corrs."A strange and traumatic experience," David Foster Wallace wrote in an essay on attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards, "which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men's room urinal between professional woodmen [male porn stars] Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma)." Aside from hinting at the hilarious absurdity with which Wallace analyzes everything from porn galas to lobster festivals to John McCain's Straight Talk Express, this passage nicely captures my emotional approach to this book: I'd heard this Wallace guy had a pretty big brain. Now I know he had a pretty big brain. Way bigger than mine. We'll see if the disparity affects my ability to, uh, write.

So he was smart. Every essay had something new for me, like how dictionaries are, unlike phone books, ideological and rhetorical in nature and therefore worthy of criticism, or how modern American novelists are embarrassed by articulating morals, and how that's a problem. Like I said, he was also funny. Aggravate-your-fellow-airplane-prisoner/patrons-with-constant-laughter funny. On top of all this, he seemed genuine, which is both forehead-smackingly sensible *and* impressive given his repeated inquiries into authenticity. Reading around I guess Wallace was well-known for being anti-ironic, but the effect on this reader was essentially the same quality Wallace himself lauds in the cornerstone piece in this collection, "Authority and American Usage": Wallace is ever-present in his own writing, and he earns his authority with wit, compassion, and some endearing absurdities (borrowing a leather jacket to be cool enough to report for Rolling Stone being my fave).

I liked his way of analyzing a subject by hanging out with people of tertiary significance. He didn't talk to John McCain, or John McCain's advisors. He hung out with the camera crews. Same with the porn awards: he spends most of his time talking to professional porn journalists (apparently that's a thing). Maybe this was his way of avoiding BS, like he didn't believe there was any hope of deriving genuine meaning about a person by actually speaking with them directly, but meaning could be triangulated through the perceptions of technicians and professionals who were not directly responsible for considering semantics (but did so all the same). In the case of John McCain that's a bit odd since the whole piece concerns the question of whether McCain actually means what he says, unlike every other politician in history.

Anyway, the more I try to think about the book the more the aforementioned metaphorical anuresis is kicking in. The book was unexpectedly magnetic, intellectually consuming, and totally compelling from start to finish. If you can stomach footnotes that have their own footnotes that are themselves then referenced in the main text, suggesting they were not actually that ancillary after all, then you should probably pick this up.

WordsOh man, so many great words.

satyriasis (n): uncontrollable sexual obsession in men. (p. 53)lallate (v): conventionally to replace your r's with l's, or to speak in a nonsensical baby fashion, but in the sense DFW intended here I guess it means calming, as in a lullaby, as described here. (p. 64)sprachgefuhl (n): sensitivity to linguistic propriety (p. 69)dysphemism (n): inserting an intentionally harsh word or phrase when a more neutral one would suffice, opposite of euphemism. Apparently never having encountered this word makes me NOT a SNOOT. (p. 70)solecism (n): linguistic goof, incorrect use of language. (p. 71 and everywhere in this essay)pertussion (n): coughing, though most dictionaries seem to list the word as "pertussis." (p. 71)styptic (adj): confining or binding in this case, but also used to describe substances that stanch bleeding. I almost wrote "staunch." If there's one word I'm going to remember from this book it's "solecism." (p. 80)spiriferous (adj): having spires. I hate words like this. (p. 42)anapest (n): two short syllables followed by one long, in this case "where's it at." Is "anapest" itself an anapest? (p. 99)trochee (n): long syllable followed by a short one. Why a "monosyllabic foot + trochee" is supposed to be uglier than a "strong anapest" is beyond me. (p. 99)pleonasm (n): excessive use of words to express something, in this cases leveled as a criticism against academic writing, which is somewhat absurd coming from DFW who is pleonastic in the extreme. (p. 115)immanent (adj): inherent, innate. (p. 151)luxated (adj): dislocated. (p. 151)prolegomenous (adj): introductory (p. 255)...more

When I read Another Turn of the Crank in college, I remember finding it irritating. Who was this moralizing purist, this thinly veiled Christian claimWhen I read Another Turn of the Crank in college, I remember finding it irritating. Who was this moralizing purist, this thinly veiled Christian claiming to know good from evil, and decrying reductionist thought? These days I've mellowed out a bit, and come to realize that authors who get under my skin like that are often the most interesting. Berry is no empty provocateur. If he pisses you off, there's something to be learned in considering why.

First of all, there's plenty I agree with in this book. I like his way of framing interactions as nurturing or exploitative, and I like the way he applies that frame not just to our interaction with the non-human world, but also to the ways we treat each other. I agree that the more leverage technology provides the greater the risk of damaging its object, and often its subject. The longer your lever, the harder it is to see what you're doing. Ok. C'mon. Someone say, "That's what she said!" Ok. Let's move on.

But then there are passages like "If competition is the correct relation of creatures to one another and to the earth, then we must ask why exploitation is not more successful than it is." (p. 106) and "until recently there was no division between sexuality and fertility, because none was possible" (p. 135). Aside from what seem like self-evident successes of competition in nature and human affairs, and the fact that prostitution and other sexual practices that have little or nothing to do with reproduction have been around for some time, his method of arguing based on his own norms and assumptions is irksome. Competition isn't the "correct" relation of creatures to one another, it's just what we observe happening. Saying that a division between sexuality and fertility is a recent innovation doesn't make it true.

Of course, both those quotes come from what I found to be the most inflammatory chapter ("The Body and the Earth"), which was actually also the most interesting to me. Linking the fertility of the land to that of the body isn't something I'd thought of or heard before. Viewing "freedom" from fertility as another destructive disconnect in our lives runs so counter to our ideas of reproductive rights, but it's worth questioning whether our culture has adapted to the technology of birth control to the extent that other cultures incorporated sex without it. Does dividing sex from reproduction prevent us of from thinking about future generations in the same way buying food at a supermarket prevents us from thinking about animal welfare and treatment of the land? No doubt there is a whole body of literature dealing with this of which I am simply unaware.

I also find it somewhat frustrating to read a book that's replete with moral critique of the society in which I live and yet finish without some vision of how to improve. What's Berry's literal notion of the good life? Does he think we should all be Amish? Does he see a realistic path from the society we have to one that's better? This isn't a critique of the book, really. Obviously there aren't easy answers to problems like our disconnection from the land, but it's unsatisfying. I guess that's life....more

I enjoyed this book because I enjoyed meeting Anne Lamott. This is a collection of personal essays on writing, and they are personal not just becauseI enjoyed this book because I enjoyed meeting Anne Lamott. This is a collection of personal essays on writing, and they are personal not just because they encapsulate an individual's unique perspective, but because that individual is very much present, going on tangents, confessing neuroses, and detailing techniques for lambasting real people in fiction without invoking libel (the key seems to be depiction of inadequately sized genitalia). She's hilarious, she's opinionated, and I just found myself enjoying her company more and more as the book went on.

I'm not sure this is a book for people who want to start writing. I think she has a lot of practical advice, but it all felt generally applicable to any creative endeavor, perhaps any form of meaningful work. I think most software engineers understand the importance of shitty first drafts, working on problems of manageable size, and identifying conditions that abet focused work. On the other hand, I don't think of writing as work (by work I don't mean compelled drudgery but rewarding impelled labor), so maybe the lesson is to take these notions I think I understand about work and apply them to another interest.

I guess part of what made this book satisfying for me was the way it depicted writing as work and not necessarily as a kind of ecstatic revelation or a path to self-actualization. Much like Matt Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, work for Anne Lamott is sitting down every day and changing the world. He unbreaks broken motorcycles, she arranges letters and meanings into novel patterns, but both change the world in ways that can be independently verified, and for both it is a daily battle of inches. Work is hard but I can do it. Revelation is wonderful and you should be attuned to signs of its presence, but the improbability of finding it by seeking it wearies me. Like so many things in adulthood, perhaps this is about making time.

On an unrelated note, I was excited by Lamott's religiosity, because I would like a book to read alongside one of the New Atheists like Dawkins Richard or Daniel Dennett, and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith might be it. I've been meaning to read them for a while but I feel like some balance so I don't end up agreeing with them too much. Any other suggestions for books on faith by authors you think I can respect?...more

Good overview. Now I feel ready to get started and build something. I may have to update this review if I find some significant gaps in my knowledge.

NGood overview. Now I feel ready to get started and build something. I may have to update this review if I find some significant gaps in my knowledge.

Note that as of Feb 2012, the second edition of this book is somewhat out of date. Many of the templates the refer to are no longer in Xcode, and recent features like Storyboards and ARC are not covered at all. I believe the 3rd ed is coming out soon, though....more

Much like 1491, this book features a vague thesis (exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world in the past 500 years has shaped the presenMuch like 1491, this book features a vague thesis (exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world in the past 500 years has shaped the present) over which Mann drapes digression upon digression, some of them fascinating, others decidedly less so, all thoroughly cited, but few of those citations referring to primary sources. Here's what I found interesting:

Chinese demand for silver drove a great deal of European expansion

When I think about the motives for European colonialism, I think of greed, flight from religious persecution, and geopolitical maneuvering. A Chinese capital sink was not on my radar, but Mann did a good job convincing me it played a role. I would have liked to see more exploration of what might have happened without a huge consumer for American silver. Inflation? Also, Chinese currency history and the endless successions of retribution in Potosi? Not that interesting. Summarize, cite, and move on, please.

Jamestown was a corporate enterprise, not a government one.

This was a minor point in the book, but I hadn't realized one of America's founding colonies wasn't exactly a bunch of people trying to reinvent themselves or the English crown making a land grab, but rather a corporation trying to turn a buck. Corporate greed is more deeply rooted in our history than I thought!

This was one of his larger points. Aside from the irony that Europeans generally failed to survive in tropical regions of the Americas because of diseases they brought with them from the tropics in other parts of the world, Mann focused primarily on the way these diseases shaped demographics and cultural institutions, drawing mostly from the work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson at MIT. Obviously it's hard/impossible to prove disease played a greater role than, say, suitability of an area for crops that can be grown en masse and require a lot of manual labor, but I think Mann successfully summarized the importance of disease. Acemoglu et al's work goes on to explore how differences in social / governmental institutions that were related to disease have influenced current economic success, basically pointing out that colonies where Europeans settled in large numbers are more economically successful today than colonies where they maintained small numbers but employed many slaves (they do a lot to separate the influence of disease on institution forming and the influence of institutions on economic success from other factors that I don't entirely understand, but I believe that's the gist). I wonder how this kind of analysis holds up when applied to US states, comparing slave and non-slave states.

American tubers and tobacco facilitated population booms and population expansion into agriculturally marginal areas in China and Europe, facilitating huge social and landscape changes

Many people seem surprised to learn that Italians hadn't heard of tomatoes before Columbus, or that the Irish weren't eating potatoes since the dawn of time, or that southeast asians weren't turbo charging their cuisine with hot chilies before Europeans showed up with their wimpy palates. If you're one of those people, be surprised no longer: all these veggies come from the Americas, along with tobacco, sweet potatoes, and corn/maize. If you're a food/history nerd, though, this probably isn't news. What I found interesting was the history of how productive, nutritional crops that could be grown in marginal soil abetted landscape changes in China (migration to hillier terrain, deforestation, increased erosion, catastrophic flooding), and how potatoes assuaged famine and may have effected political stability in European nations as those countries were industrializing and expanding their reach.

There were many synthetic communities of escaped African slaves that survived well into the present

I was totally unaware of these "maroon" cities, so this was definitely interesting. Much as the bulk of 1491 was an effort to illuminate agency among American Indian peoples, these chapters did the same for Africans in the Americas. However, I wanted to see more about how these independent hybrid cultures influenced the present. Candomblé was mentioned, along with some of Brazil's other Christianish religions, but it would have been cool to learn about what components of these practices originated in maroon communities and not among slaves.

Overall, interesting stuff. I would have liked to see some exploration of one of Mann's least supported assertions in 1491, namely that American democratic principles were influenced by Indian example, but maybe he's saving that for another book.

Notes & Words

moil (v): while this is basically synonymous with "toil," apparently it can also mean "twirl." Twirling, apparently, is hard goddamn work. (p. xvi)

ensorcel (v): bewitch (p. 5)

entrepôt (n): warehouse or distribution center (p. 8)

optative mood (n): like the subjunctive. Actually not clear what the difference is. Maybe optative is a subclass restricted to indicating a desired state? (p. 28)

p. 30 Apparently at some point a Swiss bishop exorcised a glacier. Looks like Ladurie 1971 p. 181 is the citation, but it doesn't look like it's been digitized.

p. 31 He doesn't dwell on this, but he describes the work of Dull 2010 asserting that Indian die-off lead to massive reforestation b/c of the absence of Indian-managed fire, which lead to massive carbon sequestration out of the atmosphere, which induced a reverse greenhouse effect that influence the Little Ice Age experienced from the 16th century to the 18th. That's pretty wild. Need to read the paper. I think the crux is how they measured carbon released due to burning.

anodyne (adj): relieving pain (p. 41)

p. 59 "By women his flesh was scraped from his bones with mussel shells and, before his face, thrown into the fire." Ow. Apparently this is from a primary source.

inanition (n): starvation, lethargy (p. 61)

lagniappe (n): a small bonus added on to a purchase, like a complimentary cookie from Bakesale Betty's (a bakery here in Oakland). Apparently comes from Cajun creole, and may have originated in S. America. Mann used this (to me) unusual word numerous times, yet I don't think he commented on its origins, which seems odd. (p. 142)

tisane (n): an aromatic tea (p. 152)

p. 197 apparently the word potato comes from the Taino word batata, which means sweet potato (which is unrelated to the potato)

In brief: I felt this was an adequate, often fascinating summary of human habitation of the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans as understood bIn brief: I felt this was an adequate, often fascinating summary of human habitation of the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans as understood by present-day historians and scientists. I was happy to see that Mann highlighted controversial areas without simply adopting one side of any given controversy, and in general it seemed like a balanced, well-researched book. That said, there were numerous peccadillos.

Mann starts with the basic assertion that the West's primary mistake in our conception of American Indians is that we have generally seen them as unchanging features in a primeval wilderness. This, he argues, is dehumanizing, regardless of whether you prefer to prefix "savage" with "noble," because a people incapable of change seems incapable of will, of thought, of ingenuity.

He attempts to dismantle this notion by presenting research supporting 3 broad ideas:

1) pre-Columbian population estimates are now assumed to be much higher than previously thought (i.e. between the time of first contact and the colony at Plymouth, humanity in the Americans witnessed a massive die-off)

2) humans were present in North America for tens of thousand of years, and the complexity of their societies were comparable with with Eurasian counterparts

3) Indians could and did exert influence over the natural world

On the whole, I think Mann made convincing arguments for the broad stokes. However, there were a number of things that set me off, most of them centering around my suspicion that Mann was trying harder to convince than reveal. Maybe this stems from his journalistic rather than academic background, but I constantly felt cajoled when what I wanted to feel was "of course!"

First of all there was the general lack of methods. Reconstructing history is a tricky business fraught with error, so when you're trying to communicate a challenging and controversial notion like the number of American Indians who died as a result of European diseases, I think you need to go into excruciating detail about how population numbers are derived. To his credit, Mann touches on it, but he treats the issue of error as a sort of footnote, noting one scientist who thinks the degree of error makes the numbers meaningless. Throughout the book I found myself asking, "But how do we know that?" and was generally disappointed by the number and quality of the citations (sources often include interviews, personal communication, and secondary sources that themselves lack citation).

To provide another example, on p. 234 he describes how Olmecs deformed the pliant skulls of their infants to make them look a certain way... only to admit archaeologists only assume they did this based on their artwork. No ellipsis can adequately contain my stupefaction at the absurdity of that claim. Have you seen Mesoamerican artwork? Have you seen any human artwork prior to Enlightenment Europe? Not exactly the height of realism. Perusing his source, it seems that the figurines looked deformed, and intentional deformation was apparently documented elsewhere in Mesoamerica, but the citation trail goes Spanish there, so I'm lost. If there were first-hand accounts of similar practices, you need to describe them. In the text. Because shaping baby skulls is WEIRD by our standards.

There were other portions that just seemed irrational and/or unscientific. His attempt to equate human sacrifice among the Mexica (aka Aztecs) and 17th century executions in Britain was a bit ridiculous, as fellow Goodreads user Stefan pointed out (p. 134). On p. 172 he actually describes error ranges for carbon dating as "typographical clutter" [muffled howl of rage]. On p. 291 he writes, "Indians [...] began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast." He cites Krummer (an Atlantic Monthly article about chestnut restoration) and himself, neither of which mention Indian planting. You get the picture.

Finally, I found his constant comparisons to Europe and the general sense of hand-wringing and guilt a bit trying, and that's coming from a self-avowed Western liberal hand-wringer. Two back-to-back quotes sum this up nicely:

"The complexity of a society's technology has little to do with its level of social complexity–something that we, in our era of rapidly changing seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping." (p. 250)

"But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world." (p. 251)

The sagacity of the former idea and the absurd implication that cultural and technological interchange in Eurasia was both one-way and morally wrong perfectly describe 2/3 of the Ueda-Mann Venn diagram.

But like I said, on the whole pretty good. I found the penultimate bit about defining our relationship to nature and the final section about the role American Indian concepts of freedom and individuality may have influenced the founding of the United States super intriguing, worth books of their own. Maybe that's where he's going with 1493.

I’m always wondering why I work (aside from that whole food and shelter thing), so books that try to answer that question draw my attention. While saiI’m always wondering why I work (aside from that whole food and shelter thing), so books that try to answer that question draw my attention. While said attention was utterly wasted on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, it reaped rich rewards from Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, a thoughtful, synthetic, opinionated exploration of manual labor.

Crawford argues that society undervalues working with your hands, and that physically manipulating the world demands as much intellectual rigor and is as fulfilling as any other profession, if not more so. He could have ended there, with some polemic about the irrelevance of higher education (and he certainly touches on that), but luckily Crawford isn’t so provincial, and explores the implications of this assertion quite a bit.

There’s a whole lot going on in this book, but here are the three ideas that I found most compelling:

1) Tacit knowledge is as important as explicit (encodable) knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is what you know but can’t communicate, succinctly summed up by the phrase, “you had to be there.” (I learned about this in grad school while reading an excellent essay on the destruction of knowledge related to nuclear weapons in Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change) Crawford argues repeatedly that such knowledge is ignored or misunderstood as something that can be replicated by procedure or machines, and I absolutely agree. I see this kind of knowledge in a coworker’s uncanny ability to debug something I’ve struggled with for hours given only a handful of symptoms. I also see it in an experienced naturalist’s ability to identify a weird bug “by gestalt,” or see things in nature that I can’t, even when we’re looking at exactly the same scene. It's also the kind of thing that's difficult to ascertain in a job interview, but is potentially more important than the explicit forms of knowledge that are easily discernible.

2) Some forms of cognition are only possible through physical manipulation.

Actually, I think Crawford goes further and claims cognition that isn’t directly related to the physical world is misguided. He rags on theory quite a bit. I sympathize with his tirade against a society that aspires to be a bunch of disembodied heads in jars, but I think he goes too far in equating all theorists to the absent-minded professors he derides. However, I totally agree with the underlying notion that doing is a form of thinking. When I’m on the squash court (let’s imagine I still play squash), my mind is alive with angles, velocities, and probabilities that are categorically different than their mathematical equivalents (it is also filled with rage. Don't get me started...). I imagine the same is true of musical performance. Thought is far more than simply getting lost in your own mind.

3) Work demonstrates the existence of reality by forcing us to engage objects and forces outside our control (i.e. real things). It also demonstrates our own reality when we alter this external world in ways that can be verified by others.

Crawford rails against corporate cultures that enshrine relativistic values like “being a team player,” “positive thinking,” or “creativity.” Manual labor, by contrast, provides a more nuanced understanding of your own capabilities and ultimately more self respect, because it forces you to engage with things outside of your control, like the physical world, or the idiosyncrasies of Japanese motorcycle engineers. “Good” to a motorcycle repairman means the bike is running. There’s no way to redefine that value, and its truth can be proven by anyone.

I disagree that this kind of engagement is exclusive to working with your hands, but I think the point is excellent: work that touches the world is the cure for solipsism. It provides an invaluable sense of reality that the self-conscious mind needs (well, mine does). If you’re evaluated based on subjective traits, you never know where you stand, and what you’ve accomplished can always be taken away from you by redefinition. Furthermore, your work demonstrates your reality even more when you're connected to the people who it affects. A customer waiting for his bike to be fixed generates far more poignancy than some distant consumer who may or may not drink the soda produced by the machines your underling's underling's underling's underling oversaw.

So, given all that, what would Crawford think of my job, or my life? I generally am not “the master of my own stuff,” and predominantly live in my own head. My primary engagements with the physical world are through cooking, which I assiduously avoid doing in objective (i.e. social) contexts where my food could attain maximum reality, and nature study, which is occasionally tactile, but largely mitigated by a camera lens (and somewhat motivated by a Web-based attentionmarket).

However, though he might not recognize it as such, my profession of software engineering is far more akin to motorcycle repair than the kind of subjective perception management he sees in most white collar work. I do make things that real people use, and I am connected to those people. It’s just that the things I make and the connections to the people I make them for are not physical (Howard Rheingold made an important point that "virtual" communities are not virtual in that they aren't real, they're just not physical, though I can't remember if I read that or if he said it in a class). I don’t have the advantage of tactile experience with my subject matter, but I am constantly struggling against systems I did not design and over which I have no control (like Internet Explorer). I operate within constraints, and my work is never perfect, but improves iteratively, and experience grants me both tacit and explicit understanding of successful practices and patterns. Our company culture is a lot more like the shop crew Crawford lauds than the corporate team he despises, perhaps due to the same ability to point to objective reality as the ultimate proof of value. My coworker might, say, have a disturbing obsession with cats, but man, that comment plugin he wrote is seamless, and we never have to fix it.

The book isn’t perfect by any means. Crawford occasionally resorts to some distasteful rhetorical techniques, like pushing conservative buttons (“With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility” (p. 45)), or choosing a single example of his opposition then spending pages lambasting it (I’m thinking particularly of his critique of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class a few pages later on p. 47; maybe it was a bad day). Most of his historical segments also seem to rely heavily on a few, secondary sources (Harry Braverman, T.J. Jackson Lears, Robert Jackall), a practice that doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Overall, though, this was exactly the kind of considered, informed analysis I wanted, and while I didn’t always agree with Crawford on every point, those points were excellent provocation to further consideration, and I admire him for stating his opinions openly....more

I know almost nothing about money. I know what it is (a physical representation of value that can be exchanged in place of true value), I know what aI know almost nothing about money. I know what it is (a physical representation of value that can be exchanged in place of true value), I know what a loan is, and what a bet is, but words like "bond" and "equity" set my head spinning, and "credit default swap" and "subprime mortgage bond-backed CDO" generally result in a horrible rash and near-asphixiation. So I guess I need to give this book credit for forcing me to learn a few things about money and finance, like what a mortgage is, how the debts of multiple mortgages can be used by a bank to justify borrowing more money from bigger fish in the form of mortgage bonds, and how those mortgage bonds can in turn be aggregated to support even bigger loans in the form of CDOs. I also learned about how all this aggregation theoretically reduces the risk that any individual component will fail to pay out, how one mortgage owner might end up unable to pay back the money they borrowed, but the probability that all of them will, at the same time, is supposed to be low. And finally, I have some understanding of how the inability of bond consumers and rating entities to estimate the probability of people being unable to pay back their mortgage loans led to this huge, unjustified demand for those bonds that created the incentive for mortgage grantors to loan money to ever more "subprime" customers in ever shadier deals, knowing full well those people would default, which, ultimately created the financial crisis.

Right? I got most of that? If I did, then way to go Michael Lewis. You managed to teach a complete ignoramus about something that was both complex and important, and you did it in compelling, page-turning style. Even if I got that half wrong, I'd say it was still an accomplishment.

However, this book did not make me happy. Not at all. And while I feel slightly better informed, I certainly don't feel enlightened. Or proud to be an American. Or a human being. First of all, Lewis did not predict my level of ignorance, and there was no glossary, so I definitely had to scramble to look up a lot of terms. Even now some of them are still mystifying (what the hell IS "leverage" in this context?). Second, while Lewis's protagonists were engaging, interesting, and finely detailed, I found his attempt to position them as the only moral or even sympathetic characters in the story to be, well, kind of disgusting. Sure, they had insight, and sure, they responsibly investigated the true nature of all these subprime loans, but what did they do with that knowledge? They... made money off it. Eisman made snarky comments to people who should have known better. Burry wrote a bunch of private emails to his investors. I think maybe the Cornwall guys tried to tell some journalist friends. But seriously, these "good guys" were all confident the entire world economy was going to tank, costing countless jobs and general turmoil, and they responded not by sounding the alarm or by doing everything in their power to spread what they knew, but by profiteering.

You could argue, of course, that the bets that made them rich were the financial equivalent of sounding the alarm. In theory, their credit default swaps (or more likely Lippmann's) should have drawn attention to the weakness they saw in the subprime mortgage market, thereby toning down the insanity, but they were obviously aware that the subprime crowd was very far from wisdom, so their default swaps were not attempts to save the world. Basically, Lewis paints these guys as heros, but I don't think they're any less despicable than anyone else in the book. Just smarter.

I've always maintained a completely uninformed suspicion that the world of finance was largely populated by evil, greedy, useless people who create almost nothing of value to humanity. This book did little to dispel my prejudice.

It did get me thinking about infrequent catastrophes, though. I signed up for a wilderness first aid course, I'm getting renter's insurance, and I should really, really get an earthquake preparedness kit. Really. So, you know. Win....more

As a (very amateur) student of American environmental thought and admittedly inexperienced when it comes to history, it's difficult to view this bookAs a (very amateur) student of American environmental thought and admittedly inexperienced when it comes to history, it's difficult to view this book critically. Cronon argues so clearly and so thoroughly, and so concordantly with my ecologically-informed mindset, that it's easy to forget he's arguing at all, rather than simply stating the facts. But he is trying to make a point: that the ecological changes in New England during the colonial period were largely due to the cultures of the people present at that time. Superficially, this seems obvious: a white guy replaces a forest and deer with a field and cows, creating a very different kind of scene, but forests and fields have intimate connections with the surrounding landscape, and substituting one for another has implications far beyond line of sight.

I think what I liked most about this book was how apolitical it was. Cronon presents the Indians and the Colonists as two separate people with different mindsets and established practices that result in different ways of interacting with the physical world, and yield radically different ecosystems. The connection between an abstract concept like property and an ecological phenomenon like watershed drainage is really interesting, mostly because I just never studied this stuff in school (wish I had now, of course). We learned about notions like Manifest Destiny in high school, but ecology rarely attempts this kind of integration.

Notes

"Our project must be to locate a nature which is within rather than without history, for only by so doing can we find human communities which are inside rather than outside nature." (p. 15)

This is an interesting ulterior motive, ostensibly one that Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry have been pursuing for their whole literary careers, and one that traditional conservationists generally don't value. Part of what makes it difficult to understand is that we generally define "nature" as that which is outside of the human domain, i.e. things humanity did not create or at least does not control. Bill McKibben argued that the atmosphere stopped being "natural" when humanity began influencing it (he defined nature as "the world apart from man"). But Cronon, Berry, and Pollan adopt a view that is more difficult and more accurate: that whatever nature is, it is not apart from man. Rather, nature encompasses man.

p. 20 Cronon mentions off-hand that sassafras was sought as a cure for syphilis. An extremely cursory search supports the assertion, and debunks the plant's curative properties. This sounds like the making of a Bulwer-Lytton entry: "Two liters of root beer had done little to assuage my crippling syphilis."

p. 39 Got me wondering whether "alewife" referred to shad or bunker/menhaden, or something else altogether. Turns out they are all different. Alewife is Alosa pseudoharengus, American Shad is Alosa sapidissima, and bunker (Atlantic Menhaden) is Brevoortia tyrannus. They are all herring, but only the first two are anadromous.

p. 44 It's amazing that men and the meat they hunted provided more than 50% of the food for northern New England Indians. The Ohlone Way suggested that Indian men in the Bay Area provided very little nutrition compared with the acorns and shellfish gathered and processed by women. I see a lot more shellfish and acorns in my wanderings, so I wonder how accurate the New England figure is.

p. 49 Indian fire practices are pretty interesting. How long had they been doing it? Was it sustainable simply because of low Indian population densities?

p. 80 I realize this point about Indian happiness is ancillary, but I'd still like a little supporting evidence, particularly relating to the happiness of modern hunter-gatherers. How do we know they're happy?

p. 112 this discussion of white pine depletion made me want to read a similar book on the post-industrial historical ecology of New England. I wouldn't say white pines were particularly abundant in the post-colonial woods of my neighborhood, but they were certainly there. What are the good sources on the re-wilding of New England?

p. 133 "Individual wolves that were particularly rapacious might have an unusually high bounty placed on their heads: thus, New Haven in 1657 offered five pounds to anyone who could kill 'one great black woolfe of a more than ordinarie bigness, which is like to be more feirce and bould than the rest, and so occasions the more hurt.'" There are at least 5 awesome band / pub names in there....more

Amusing collection of bird lore severely hampered in its credibility by a nearly complete lack of citation. It is hard to believe the tiny 2-page biblAmusing collection of bird lore severely hampered in its credibility by a nearly complete lack of citation. It is hard to believe the tiny 2-page bibliography is anywhere near comprehensive. There is also a distinct bias toward European and British folklore. If the book is to be believed, though, I have learned two things about Jesus: he was fond of transforming people he didn't like into birds, and he died surrounded by a flock of birds variously trying to assuage or enhance his suffering....more

Speaking as someone with very little grounding in philosophy aside from what I learned in high school, I'd say this is a good way to get a broad overvSpeaking as someone with very little grounding in philosophy aside from what I learned in high school, I'd say this is a good way to get a broad overview from the Greeks up to Sartre. That said, his description of Darwin and natural selection definitely had a whiff of sympathy for intelligent design. Since this was the one area I felt pretty knowledgeable about beforehand, I now have doubts about his perspective on the rest of the thinkers described.

The story is fun at the beginning, but once the central conceit is revealed, the book unravels into a sloppy collection of sophomoric meta jokes. When Alberto stops writing his missives, the philosophical portions of the book degrade into perfunctory exchanges of the "Do tell me more" variety. Ugh. On top of all that, this book may have single-handedly ruined the word "bagatelle" for me.

If you're looking for a quick primer on philosophy, I guess I'd recommend this. Don't read it as a novel....more

A great little overview of some notable biologists and their discoveries. Carroll tempers his wonder with rigor, succinctly but thoroughly explainingA great little overview of some notable biologists and their discoveries. Carroll tempers his wonder with rigor, succinctly but thoroughly explaining a great deal of science alongside the zany adventures of his heroes, with ample citations in appendices. My only critiques are that it was too brief to be completely satisfying for someone familiar with the science (at least in broad strokes), and the occasional moments of dorkiness (Snakes on Plane reference (p. 145)? Seriously?).

Notes

"I did not want to write a book about miserable bastards" (p. xvi)

After being shocked by his first electric eel and left "affected for the rest of the day with a violent pain in the knees, and in almost every joint," Humboldt proceeded to shock himself and his companion again and again to determine how and when the shocks were issued. Awesome. (p. 2)

Sibley's bird guides have become the authoritative field guides to the birds of North America, and with good reason: thoughtful, consistent layout comSibley's bird guides have become the authoritative field guides to the birds of North America, and with good reason: thoughtful, consistent layout combined with beautiful, precise illustrations and lots of helpful ID notes make for a great experience. So, I was pretty intrigued to find he made a guide to trees. Like the bird guides, it is beautiful and packed with great information (the range maps are particularly useful), but overall it's not quite up to snuff. I've actually been reading the guide (intro, looking up favorite trees, etc) for a few days, but I just gave it a test drive in the field today and found it sadly wanting, especially in comparison the the drier key approach used in my go-to plant guide for this area, Beidleman and Kozloff's Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region. One major problem is a lack of any kind of preview or index system. Sibley's bird guides begin each family or major group with a grid of all the species contained therein, which is pretty useful for giving the whole group a glance and picking out the bird you've got in your binocs, and when this fails those guides are still pretty flippable: go somewhere close to the bird you're looking at (passerines, divers, raptors, etc), start flipping, and you'll see something similar. It's much harder to do this for trees, given their highly variable appearance, so it's hard to narrow down possibilities. Sure it's a pine but... this is the west. There are a lot of pines. Many practical tidbits seem to be lacking as well, like the "hairy armpits" where the veins fork on the underside of a coast live oak leaf, or the way a juniper's berries smell like gin when crushed.

Overall, I think this is a great home reference, but I'll stick to keys in the field....more

So awesome. I laughed pretty much all the way home from the Alternative Press Expo, where I bought a copy from the author herself! Even got a signaturSo awesome. I laughed pretty much all the way home from the Alternative Press Expo, where I bought a copy from the author herself! Even got a signature with a pic of Emperor Norton. Score. If you like hilarity and you like history, you need to stop reading this and visit http://harkavagrant.com . If anything there makes you laugh even a little, you should buy this book and other Hark! stuff....more

This is a beautiful little book (more of an essay, really), about cultivating a small child's sense of wonder with the natural world, though I think iThis is a beautiful little book (more of an essay, really), about cultivating a small child's sense of wonder with the natural world, though I think it should renew or awaken that sense in all readers. I especially appreciated Carson's acknowledgement of emotion as the "fertile soil" in which knowledge and wisdom grow, and that she urges parents and children (and everyone else) to seek out questions and mysteries when exploring the outdoors, rather then stressing over names or scientific facts. The name of a flower, or an understanding of its physiology, or the grasp of the genetic underpinnings of its color, can all deepen and elaborate upon your appreciation of the whole, but that first caught breath over the arc of a pendant petiole is the kernel of that appreciation. That's what's important.

Now that I've extolled Carson's lack of emphasis on pedantic naturalism, let's get pedantic: my edition had all these photos from the West! Carson's talking about Maine and I'm looking at pictures of lupines and poppies?! What the hell....more

I picked this up because I heard the author speak on a couple public radio shows and he seemed interesting. I've also always struggled with the ideasI picked this up because I heard the author speak on a couple public radio shows and he seemed interesting. I've also always struggled with the ideas of "work" and "vocation" (i.e. I imagine that if I had the latter, the former wouldn't be so frustrating), so I was actually very excited to read an examination of "the pleasures and sorrows of work." Unfortunately, this book is less an examination and more a set of witty but disorganized notes from a handful of trips to different workplaces. He doesn't even begin to state the purpose of the book until about 70 pages in, when you learn he's somewhat concerned about the dilution of meaning in a specialized workforce. Up until then, it's mostly just ruminations on the magnitude of the shipping industry or the absurdity of cookie marketing, and this continues throughout, seasoned with amusing turns of phrase, notes on his personal travails, and the occasional absurd and completely unexplored assertion, like "It is the high-minded [i.e. idealistic, un-capitalist:] countries that have let their members starve." Funny stuff, occasionally intriuging, but unfulfilling. Where's the history? Where's the hypothesizing on root causes? Who's actually happy at work and why?

I think the most telling fault is the near complete lack of anyone's voice but the author's. Almost no sign of workers speaking for themselves, in their own words, despite the obvious fact that he talked to many, many people. Botton seems much more interested in his own disjointed mental peregrinations than in how his "research" subjects actually think and feel about work, and about the role of work in the overall scope of human affairs....more

It's hard to read Cannery Row, Between Pacific Tides, and The Log from the Sea of Cortez without wanting to know a little more about Ed Ricketts. He'sIt's hard to read Cannery Row, Between Pacific Tides, and The Log from the Sea of Cortez without wanting to know a little more about Ed Ricketts. He's easily the most intriguing figure in Steinbeck's novel, a saintly, self-made satyr / scientist who seems just as likely to hand you a cold beer as a live octopus, relishing the qualities of both with equal gusto. And his own book depicts him as the finest kind of nerd, a man who welcomes you into his arcane passions instead of assuming that you wouldn't understand or care, generous with both explanation and wonder. So how could I resist picking this up?

I'm not a big reader of biographies, so I'm not entirely sure how they're supposed to play out, but I'd say this one was a competent but unremarkable chronicle Ricketts' life outside the Steinbeck canon. Tam focuses on Ricketts' travels to the outer shores of western British Columbia and southern Alaska, the setting of Ricketts' final and unfinished book on the West coast of North America (having already described the southern regions in The Log and the central in BPT). These descriptions are certainly interesting, and made me want to hop on a boat to Vancouver, but mostly seem like a sequence of events without any unifying thesis.

What I really wanted to know about Ricketts were a) his personal relationships, b) his science, and c) separating him from Steinbeck, whose many "Doc" characters seem to muddy our perceptions of Ricketts himself. Tam does some of each, but I didn't come away feeling like any of these goals had been achieved. Ricketts had three wives, several children, and who knows how many mistresses, but Tam doesn't really dwell on any of them. All I really learned was that Toni, his wife during much of the northern excursions, must have been an absolute saint to put up with all the zany adventures and personal trauma.

Tam talks a good deal about Ricketts' pioneering and prescient ideas about community ecology, particularly from a conservationist standpoint, but again, I came away with the impression not of a great but overlooked ecologist, but of an inspired, thoughtful man who was handicapped by an inability to express himself clearly in scientific terms. Why essays and not papers? Did he submit papers to scholarly journals that were rejected because of his lack of education? If so, what was in those papers? What specific aspects of his research have since been vindicated? Tam dwells on this a little toward the end regarding Ricketts' investigation into over-exploitation of the sardine fishery, but I wanted more.

Steinbeck, of course, looms large, which is inevitable, I guess. It would have been wonderful to read some of their correspondence, as I think it would have helped parse the two and reveal more about their relationship than their obvious fondness and respect for each other. However, Steinbeck burned many of their letters, so I guess we'll never know. I would have appreciated less on Ricketts' influence on Steinbeck, though. It's interesting that Steinbeck (and Campbell) were so influenced by Ricketts' ideas, but I wanted more description of those ideas themselves, and less on how more famous authors used them. I'm still not entirely clear what non-teleological thinking or "breaking through" are all about. What do philosophers think of these ideas?

Anyway, mostly satisfying. Definitely recommended for Ricketts and Steinbeck fans, probably not terribly important for others....more

I think this is probably a decent introduction to learning about the native peoples of the Bay Area, but the form is seriously flawed. More than halfI think this is probably a decent introduction to learning about the native peoples of the Bay Area, but the form is seriously flawed. More than half the book is written in a narrative style, describing possible scenes from an Ohlone village. It's engaging and memorable, but I found it almost impossible to trust any of the factual details included because of the fictional style and the author's obvious belief in the moral superiority of the Ohlone. Look how in harmony with nature they are! Look how tolerant they are! They had no problem with homosexuality! Even if these things were true, harping on them just makes Margolin seems biased, and since there are absolutely NO citations, it's impossible to verify most of the claims without simply reading through his entire bibliography.

If we take Margolin at his word, though, there are some pretty interesting nuggets. One detail that was so strange I have difficulty believing the author didn't make it up was that Ohlone mothers used to shape the pliable skulls of their infants so they would have a particular facial structure. That just seems amazing to me.

Now I really want to go visit the Coyote Hills Regional Park, which has some Ohlone archaeological sites and some exhibits on them....more

I'm not sure I've ever read another book that was so full of life, in every sense of the word. Steinbeck and Ricketts portray an existence and a philoI'm not sure I've ever read another book that was so full of life, in every sense of the word. Steinbeck and Ricketts portray an existence and a philosophy that seem impossibly engaged, impossibly full, and it isn't long before you're there on the boat beside them, a can of beer in one hand and a dip net in the other, peering into blue shallows in search of strange and beautiful creatures.

It's bohemian (two guys charter a boat to go tidepooling around the Gulf of California, mostly for the hell of it), but rigorous (specimens are tediously labeled, filed, described). Despite one of them being a professional in the strictest sense, both Ricketts and Steinbeck are the best kind of amateurs, seeking knowledge and adventure for the pure joy and love they find in them. They're driven by a mission to describe the fauna of a relatively unexplored region, but that drive never consumes or defines them, or keeps them from swilling beer and philosophizing. Their humor and presence in their journey brought as much pleasure to read and inhabit as any escapist fantasy I can imagine.

The introduction breaks that fantasy a bit, describing how Steinbeck developed the book from journals that were not his own, and the complete omission of Steinbeck's wife Carol, who also sailed with them. Then again, the intro and Steinbeck's euology to Ricketts provide a realistic backdrop that grounds and encapsulates the joy of the trip, making it seem more attainable, and more true. You can never live aboard the Western Flyer, but you can always seek those kinds of moments....more

Finally wrapped up this slim volume. I'll go through my notes later, but for now I'll just say it was fascinating how many aspects of evolution DarwinFinally wrapped up this slim volume. I'll go through my notes later, but for now I'll just say it was fascinating how many aspects of evolution Darwin described in almost exactly the same way I learned it in school, from the basics of natural selection to sexual selection, even selection acting upon traits that arise through non-adaptive means (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel...)!

So, I will be perfectly honest and say that I picked this up strictly to read at a coffee shop, because I'd forgotten my current book at home and it had such a pretty cover, but I've always felt rather guilty about not having read Darwin, given that his idea revolutionized my favorite field of study (uh, even though I don't actually study it), and that he actually lived some of the life of my literary hero Stephen Maturin (minus the spying, I assume). So, guilt, intellectual curiosity, and naked consumerism for once worked in concert.

First and foremost, it was amazing to read a scientific work from 150 years ago and find its ideas largely up to date, especially considering how difficult it would be to do the same reading a similar work on geology from 80 years ago, or a work on molecular biology from 40 years ago. Granted, I'm no scientist and I can't exactly vouch for Darwin's accuracy in all cases, but natural selection and sexual selection as he described them seem to be just about the same as when I learned them a couple years ago.

Darwin's rhetorical style was also interesting. It was so ... theoretical! All his arguments rested upon an exceedingly large and long-considered set of observations from which he extracted certain generalizations, just like any good set of hypotheses. But nothing was tested! He didn't even venture to describe what kind of experiments might have been conducted! And I suppose that's just the way it had to be, since he had absolutely no mechanical explanation for his theories, no notion of Mendel, genetics, or of DNA. At the same time, he had the humble uncertainty of the ideal scientist, constantly trying to cover all his bases, anticipate counter-arguments, and admit weaknesses that he had not been able to resolve. In a way, it's amazing how much more revealing of his personality this is than any modern academic paper, and this is apparent in the prose as well, which he littered with personal pronouns and generally exhibits a level of verbosity that would seem fairly uncouth in a modern journal.

Finally, it amazed me how normative he was about natural selection. At the end, he wrote,

...as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

Perfection! And used without condition! It's so easy to interpret this sentence as a testament to humanity's superiority to all past forms of life that I must imagine Darwin felt it, at least a little, unless he was trying to lay in some bulwarks against the inevitable religious attack. I maybe have to read The Descent of Man to find out....more

This is essentially a self-help guide for programmers, the kind of book that enumerates the habits of Good and Happy People and makes you feel slightlThis is essentially a self-help guide for programmers, the kind of book that enumerates the habits of Good and Happy People and makes you feel slightly guilty about not practicing most of them, but probably won't result in you forsaking your evil ways and stepping on the path toward Nirvana. Hunt and Thomas are friendly but occasionally annoying gurus. Their cloying metaphors (boiled frogs, etc) and kitsch jokes are offputting, and some of their advice borders on insult. One assumes that when they devote a whole section to interpersonal communication that they are targetting the particularly closeted and uncouth breed of computer geek recently emerged from the dark and brutish cave of high school, struggling to make headway in a world full of messy, inconsistent, emotional people who don't even know how to reverse grep an Apache log.

That said, I think there are nuggets of good advice for everyone all over the book. Programming, like reading and writing, is ultimately a private, personal activity, and to be honest, most of us software engineers were that closeted high school nerd at some point, and draw upon that focused, single-minded persona when we do things like coding, so there are lessons to be learned from taking a step back occasionally and examining the craft, as Hunt and Thomas do. They are, as I said, occasionally infuriating, but even their silly aphorisms and mantras are usually memorable (what software engineer isn't constantly trying to stay DRY?). I've no doubt I'll be flipping through it again in the future, especially when I feel like I've hit a wall, fell in a rut, or found myself exploiting tired and hackneyed idioms that don't do the English language any justice....more

Yes, I seriously read a typographic style manual, but believe me, it was worth it. Not only is this a detailed, informative, and surpassingly witty suYes, I seriously read a typographic style manual, but believe me, it was worth it. Not only is this a detailed, informative, and surpassingly witty survey of typography, but it's a simply beautiful book to hold and to read. It's a bit like taking an introductory lesson from a friendly architecture professor, learning about intricacies and critical minutia you had never before considered, and slowly realizing your teacher designed the room, the building, perhaps even the chair you're sitting in, and that the entirety of your surroundings is an expression of the lesson itself. I feel similarly about Tufte's books, except there the classroom is a church, and the professor is a jerk.

I picked this up as a sort of sideways approach to improving my web design (planning on moving on to The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web next). I hope I absorbed a little (because there's a lot to know), but I think the main thing I've learned is a finer appreciation for the discipline. Invisibility is the mark of almost all good design, but good typography is hard to see even when you're looking right at it. Words are hard not to read, but at least now I know to at least try and take a closer look.

Did I mention this book is hilarious? There's this one note on setting ragged text, in which Bringhurst cautions against giving software free reign over "an honest rag." "Unless the measure is excruciatingly narrow," he writes, "you may prefer the greater variations of a hard rag. This means fixed word spaces, no minimum line, no letterspacing, and no hyphenation beyond what is inherent in the text. In a hard rag, hyphenated linebreaks may occur in words like self-consciousness, which are hyphenated anyway, but they cannot occur without manual intervention in words like hyphenation or pseudosophistication, which aren't." The note, of course, is set with a hard rag. I mean, how many ironic involutions can you fit in a paragraph? I guess paragraphs about paragraphs provide extraordinary opportunities.

I'm finding myself increasingly fascinated with (and amused by) expertise in all its forms, and this book is a prime example. Parts of it are akin to reading wine labels that speak of odors and flavors you could never even imagine, let alone recognize in a glass of wine. The specimen section is particularly wine label-like, where Bringhurst analyzes an assortment of notable typefaces. He describes Quadraat as "not pretty; its beauty is deeper and stranger than that" (p. 244). Throw in some talk of ascenders and bicamerality and you've got attributes just as arcane and remarkable as "hay-scented" and "overtones of kumquat."